Empires of the Monsoon

The Portuguese badly needed to recruit foreigners of Cadamosta’s calibre, but as their caravels explored further into unknown waters the desire for secrecy became an obsession. This was demonstrated when a ship’s pilot and two sailors fled to Castile after a voyage to West Africa. They were accused of theft, but the real fear was that they would ‘disserve the king’ by revealing navigational secrets. They were followed; the two sailors were beheaded and the pilot was brought back ‘with hooks in his mouth’ to be executed. His body was quartered and put on display to discourage any more intending turncoats. Death was the accepted penalty for giving away the details of charts; it was equally forbidden to sell a caravel to any foreigner.

The Castilians were warned to leave Africa to the Portuguese by a papal bull issued in 1455 by Nicholas V. This gave Portugal exclusive rights of conquest and possession in all ‘Saracen or pagan lands’ beyond Cape Bojador. The bull was issued in response to appeals from Prince Henry, after Castile had laid tentative claims to the ‘Guinea coast’ (a term newly coined by European mariners). The Pope declared that Henry believed he would best perform his duty to God by making the sea navigable ‘as far as the Indians, who are said to worship the name of Christ, and that he thus might be able to enter into relations with them, and to incite them to aid the Christians against the Saracens and other such enemies of the faith’. Thus the Vatican openly proclaimed Henry’s ultimate goal: to sail to India by circumnavigating Africa.

The papal bull had been issued two years after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, a moment when Europe was quaking at the thought of where the ‘Mohamedans’ might strike next. Western Christendom had quarrelled down the centuries with Byzantium, over religious doctrine and more material matters, but all too late regretted its demise, its martyrdom. The Portuguese had responded with a unique militancy to the Pope’s call to Christian nations to unite to recover Constantinople. Despite claims of a revelation from God that the victorious Sultan Mehmet II would be defeated and brought as a prisoner to Rome, to be ‘stamped under the foot of the Pope’ and forcibly baptized, only in Lisbon was there any eagerness for a new ‘crusade against the Infidel’. The fervent Portuguese proclaimed that they would raise an army 12,000 strong. They also minted a coin, made with West African gold, and called it the cruzado (crusade).

For the merchant states of Italy, the fall of Constantinople was of far more immediate moment, because it struck at the heart of their trade. All over the Mediterranean, Christian ships went in fear of being captured or sunk by Turkish raiders. Since the Turks never ventured beyond the Strait of Gibraltar the geographical good fortune of the Portuguese grew ever more apparent. Their caravels feared only the challenge of marauding Castilians as they advanced doggedly southwards in the Atlantic and down the West African coast.

In 1436, another bull had granted the Order of Christ jurisdiction ‘all the way to the Indians’. This steady flow of papal encouragement entrenched in the minds of the royal family in Lisbon that it was their destiny and religious duty to find the route to the East. The young King Afonso proclaimed extravagantly that his uncle, Prince Henry, had ‘conquered the coasts of Guinea, Nubia and Ethiopia, desirous of winning for God’s holy church, and reducing to obedience to us, those barbarous peoples whose lands Christians had never before dared to visit’.

However, the last events in Henry’s life had nothing to do with this vision. In 1458 he returned to the scenes of the first Portuguese venture into Africa, when he helped Afonso capture Alcacer Ceguer, a town next to Ceuta. The army used for the purpose was the one originally raised to help liberate Constantinople from the Turks, but never despatched because all other European countries drew back from action. For Henry the assault on Alcacer Ceguer was heart-stirring, since all his brothers were dead and he was one of a diminishing few who could recall the victory at Ceuta, more than forty years earlier.5

Two years later Henry died, at the age of sixty-six. His dream of reaching the ‘land of the Indies’ was unfulfilled, although black slaves were now being brought back to Portugal at a rate of 30,000 a year, many for re-export to Spain and Italy. By the time of Henry’s death the caravels were exploring 1,500 miles beyond Cape St Vincent. They had rounded the great bulge of West Africa and were following the coastline almost due east. It seemed, deceptively, that the route to the Indies lay straight ahead.

After Henry’s death the task of carrying forward the voyages of discovery was contracted out to a Portuguese businessman, Fernando Gomez, on terms that would financially benefit the crown. The arrangement left King Afonso free to concentrate on ways to strike another blow in Morocco. By 1471, he was ready to attack an enemy temptingly weakened through the incompetence of its sultans. A 30,000-strong army boarded 300 ships: caravels and the larger armed merchant vessels known as carracks. The destination was Arzila, a seaport on the Atlantic coast some forty miles south of Tangier. It was in no way a military bastion, and had little chance of defying the heavily-armed Portuguese attackers. After a brief resistance, the population surrendered and awaited its fate. Afonso quickly settled that: 2,000 inhabitants, men, women and children, were put to the sword, and 5,000 were carried off as slaves.6

News of the massacre spread north to the city of Tangier, whose people knew that their turn must be next. Panic took hold and the population fled either by land or sea, carrying with them what they could. Other nearby towns capitulated without a fight. The Portuguese marched in unchallenged. Prince John, the sixteen-year-old heir to the throne, was taken by his father on this exhilarating crusade, a revenge for the humiliation inflicted upon Prince Henry at Tangier more than thirty years earlier.

Viewed from the Moroccan side, the loss of Tangier, in particular, was a catastrophe. The city’s 700-year-old role as the gateway to Europe, to Andalusia, had been reversed. The birthplace of Ibn Battuta now became a point of departure for Afonso’s onslaughts. Since it was customary to honour monarchs with a soubriquet, the conquering hero of Arzila and Tangier became entitled ‘Afonso the African’.

The Moroccan crusade in the final decades of the fifteenth century was to set the pattern for Portugal’s behaviour in later conquests much further afield. Many of the young knights – the noble fidalgos – received unforgettable lessons in plundering, raping and killing without mercy. They came to accept that the lives of Muslims, men, women and children alike, counted for nothing because they were the foes of Christendom.

So 1471 had been memorable for the victories in Morocco, and it was momentous in another way. Far to the south, in waters where no European had ever sailed before, a captain called Alvaro Esteves crossed the equator, close to an island he named São Tomé. What was more, he found that the African coastline had changed direction again; his caravels’ bows were once more pointing due south. On his seaward side the ocean seemed endless. To landward, the snake-green forest was impenetrable, hiding everything beyond the shoreline.

Although the entrepreneur Gomez had met his side of the bargain, extending the range of the caravels for another 1,500 miles, his contract was ended in 1475. By that time Portugal was facing a critical challenge along the Guinea coast from the Spaniards. Prince John took charge of driving them out. Fighting between the rival caravels for the right to exploit the African trade was savage. Prisoners were never taken; captives were hanged or thrown overboard.

The Spaniards had more ships, the Portuguese were more ferocious. In 1478 a thirty-five-strong Spanish fleet arrived off West Africa to do battle, and it was defeated. The Portuguese monopoly of the route to the Indian Ocean was secure.

FOURTEEN

The Shape of the Indies

They report therefore that there were in Inde three thousand Townes of very large receit, and nyne thousand sundry sorts of people. Moreover it was believed a long time to be the third part of the world.

—Caius Julius Solinus, c. A.D. 300. trans Arthur Golding (1587)

DURING THE LAST TWO DECADES of the fifteenth century the Portuguese sailed ever onwards through the South Atlantic; yet the further they explored beyond the Guinea Coast the more meagre were the material rewards: good harbours were scarce and the inhabitants of coastal villages vanished into the forests before landing parties could capture them.1 Africa seemed both hostile and never-ending. King Afonso, notorious for the waxing and waning of his enthusiasms, began losing faith in this costly venture into the unknown. His doubts infected the court.

The Portuguese also had deeper anxieties. When they looked beyond the Atlantic, to the time when Africa’s geography might finally be conquered, they saw vast gaps in their knowledge of what they must then confront. What should be their strategy upon reaching the East, that wondrous goal? Facts were so scanty that ‘Indies’ was a term often used to embrace all the world from the Nile to China.

India itself was sometimes reputed to be an immense country, at others a patchwork of many fertile isles. Regarding the seas round the Indies – their extent, their winds, their currents – even less was known. The names of a few Indian Ocean ports were common currency, but there was little idea of where they were in relation to one another.

The Portuguese could have learned a great deal from accounts by Arab travellers such as Ibn Battuta, but these seem to have been out of reach. By far the best source on the Indies was still the thirteenth-century narrative by Marco Polo. A few missionaries had found their way to the East since his time, but their accounts were fragmentary. Most of what the Greek and Roman historians once knew was now lost or surviving only in garbled forms, such as the much-translated work of Solinus.

For decades the Portuguese brooded over every scrap of information. After the fall of Constantinople it had even become perilous to set foot in the Muslim lands flanking the eastern Mediterranean – Turkey, Syria and Egypt – which before 1453 could still be visited by adventurous Christians whose purpose, or excuse, was to see the holy places of Jerusalem. The triumph of the Ottoman Turks over Byzantium had closed many windows on the East.

Yet there were clues to be garnered from the memoirs of Europeans who had visited those lands shortly before Constantinople fell. Most detailed of all was the narrative of a French knight, Bertrandon de la Brocquière, an intimate of the Duke of Burgundy. With several friends he went to Venice by way of Rome in the spring of 1432, and from there to Palestine. When his aristocratic companions turned for home, la Brocquière set off to Damascus, where he found that European merchants were locked into their homes at night and closely watched. ‘The Christians are hated at Damascus,’ he wrote.

Dressed as an Arab, la Brocquière spent months wandering through Turkey. By his own account he was many times lucky to escape assassination, and although he once came to a valley where the road led to Persia, he did not dare take it. The military strength and confidence of the Turks was far greater than he had expected, although when safely back in Burgundy he felt it his duty to put forward a scheme for defeating them. (It involved bringing together the best bowmen of France, England and Germany, supported by light cavalry and infantry armed with battleaxes. After driving the Turks from eastern Europe this army might, ‘if sufficiently numerous’, even march on to take Jerusalem.)

While in Damascus the Burgundian had watched a caravan of 3,000 camels arrive in the city, with pilgrims from Mecca. He learned that spices from India were brought up the Red Sea ‘in large ships’ to the coast near Mecca. ‘Thither the Mohammedans go to purchase them. They load them on camels, and other beasts of burden, for the markets of Cairo, Damascus and other places, as is well known.’

This was the trade which Portugal yearned to usurp. In those Arab markets the main buyers of pepper and silks and other oriental products had always been merchants from Italy, and the Venetians above all. If truth about the Indies was to be sifted from fantasy, then Venice was surely the place for the Portuguese to begin their investigations.2 Moreover, relations between Lisbon and the mighty republic had been cordial ever since the visit of Prince Pedro in 1428.

Italy did not fail the Portuguese. Shortly before the middle of the fifteenth century a Venetian named Nicolo de’ Conti had appeared in Rome after twenty-five years abroad. His first action was to ask for an audience with the Pope, to seek absolution for having (as he claimed, to save his life) renounced Christianity in favour of Islam during his travels. The Pope, Eugene IV, was sympathetic to Nicolo, and the penance he imposed was mild: the Venetian must recount his experiences to the papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini.

With his inquisitive and rational mind, Poggio typified the new spirit of the Renaissance. He was preparing a world encyclopaedia entitled On the Vicissitudes of Fortune, and his interest in geography was keen. In the past he had written to Prince Henry of Portugal, congratulating him extravagantly for his maritime explorations: by penetrating regions unknown, Henry was even ‘exceeding the deeds of Alexander the Great’.

Nicolo de’ Conti had much to relate about a career which had taken him to the borders of China. In 1419, when he was a young man, Nicolo had gone to Damascus, set up as a merchant, then decided to travel eastwards with a trading caravan. But unlike Bertrandon de la Brocquière, he did not turn back at the decisive moment. Adopting Persian dress, and speaking Arabic and Persian, Nicolo found his way to India. From there he spent many years sailing from port to port round the Indian Ocean. He made his home in India, where he married and raised a family.

Nicolo’s travels in India itself had been wide-ranging. He knew the ports of the sub-continent, and had also travelled far inland. The great ‘maritime city’ of Calicut was ‘eight miles in circumference, a noble emporium for all India, abounding in pepper, lac [crimson lake], ginger, a larger kind of cinnamon’. Although he was not slow to criticize Indians, describing the practice of suttee in gruesome detail and maintaining that they were ‘much addicted to licentiousness’, he was equally ready to report that they regarded the Franks (Europeans) as arrogant for thinking they excelled all other races in wisdom.

He recounted the scenes of daily life in India, even describing how women arranged their hair, sometimes using false locks, ‘but none paint their faces, with the exception of those who dwell near Cathay’. In Calicut there was fondness for polyandry, with one woman having as many as ten husbands; the men contributed among themselves to the upkeep of the shared wife, and she would allocate her children to the husbands as she thought fit.3

Nicolo’s years of living and travelling in the Indian Ocean lands corresponded precisely with the visits by Zheng He’s fleets, and several of his accounts of local customs closely match those of Ma Huan, the Chinese interpreter. The two describe, almost word for word, the Indian test for guilt or innocence, by which an accused person’s finger was dipped in boiling oil. Like Ma, the Venetian could not refrain from telling how men in Thailand had pellets inserted in their penises; unlike Ma he even dared to explain how this was intended to gratify their womenfolk. The Pope’s secretary dutifully wrote it all down.

Nicolo never referred directly to the Chinese, but his knowledge of them appears in the memoirs of a Spaniard named Pero Tafur, who had encountered him in Egypt. There is a familiar ring of truth when Tafur quotes what Nicolo had told him about vessels in the Red Sea: ‘He described their ships as like great houses, and not fashioned at all like ours. They have ten or twelve sails, and great cisterns of water within, for there the winds are not very strong; and when at sea they have no dread of islands or rocks.’ This is, unmistakably, a description of an ocean-going Chinese junk. When questioned by Poggio the Venetian explained how these giants of the Indian Ocean were made: ‘The lower part is constructed with triple planks. But some ships are built in compartments, so that should one part be shattered, the other part remaining entire they may accomplish the voyage.’

While Nicolo was making his way back to Europe he had dared to join a pilgrimage to Mecca. He seems also to have visited Ethiopia, since he tells of seeing ‘Christians eating the raw flesh of animals’ – a distinctively Ethiopian habit. The last stage of Nicolo’s long journey home was marred by tragedy: in Egypt his Indian wife and their children died, probably from the plague, and he lingered in Cairo for two years, working for the sultan as an interpreter.

As an informant, Nicolo was both practical and entertaining. Being a merchant he could tell Poggio a lot about the cities and trading practices of the Indian Ocean; he also had an eye for local customs. He might even have matched his compatriot Marco Polo as a story-teller, if only fate had given him an amanuensis on a par with Rustichello of Pisa and all the leisure granted by a spell in prison. However, within the constraints imposed by his other duties, Poggio drew out of the Venetian a lively, coherent account of life in the East.

It was two or three years before the papal secretary found time to complete his encyclopaedia, which was written in Latin: what Nicolo had told him was included in Book IV. Copies in both Latin and Italian soon reached Lisbon, where they were closely scrutinized. Soon the Venetian’s memoirs were extracted and distributed separately, under the title India Rediscovered. Some years later, after the invention of printing, they would be published in Portuguese.

The Portuguese went on hunting for every source of information about the Indian Ocean.4 One highly-placed friend, and a keen collector of geographical news, was a Florentine banker, Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli, whose ideas would later influence Christopher Columbus. Since Italy led the way in cartography, it was to there that Lisbon turned for a visual compilation of all that was now known about the East. They wanted to see their own discoveries embodied in this work (without revealing too much to potential rivals), and because their ambitions were boundless they wanted a map not merely of the Indian Ocean and its environs, but of the entire known world: a mappa mundi.

The result of Portuguese curiosity was the making of one of the most intricately ornate maps in existence. The artist was a monk, Brother Mauro, at S. Michele di Murano, a monastery outside Venice. He had been renowned for many years as a physician, mathematician and ‘cosmographer’, but only towards the end of his life did he concentrate upon his masterpiece, the detailed mappa mundi, almost two metres across. Adorned in colour with fanciful paintings of towns and sprinkled with finely-scripted explanatory legends, it is as much a work of art as a piece of cartography, a mélange of true research and medieval imaginings. In some ways, Mauro’s ideas were decidedly old-fashioned: his world, which he portrayed ‘upside down’, with north at the bottom, is depicted as flat and nearly circular, with the sides of the continents following its circumference, yet always enclosed by an outer seas.

The Portuguese paid Brother Mauro’s monastery to hasten the mappa mundi. When the map was finished the original was sent to Lisbon and the monastery kept a copy. (Their intermediary with the papal secretary Poggio had probably been a certain Dom Gomez, head of the Camaldolite Order in Portugal, the very order to which Brother Mauro belonged.)

Naturally, the Portuguese were anxious for any clues as to whether ships might be able round the furthest extremity of Africa, wherever that was. Brother Mauro did not fail them. In the Indian Ocean a junk is depicted, and the legend says: ‘About the year 1420 an Indian vessel, or junk, which was on her way across the Indian Ocean to the Islands of Men and Women, was caught by a storm and carried for 40 days, 2,000 miles, beyond Cavo de Diab to the west and southwest, and when the stress of the weather had subsided, was seventy days in returning to the Cape.’ The source of this vignette, written in a monastery close to Venice in 1459, must surely have been that lately-returned Venetian traveller, Nicolo de’ Conti. In his conversations with Poggio Bracciolini, the Venetian had even talked of the mythical ‘Islands of Men and Women’; following the lead of Marco Polo he said they were near the island of Socotra, off the Hom of Africa.

Mauro’s masterpiece inevitably owes much to Marco Polo. ‘Cathay’ is crowded with exquisitely executed miniature paintings of walled cities, each different from the next, and all conceived as being like cities in Italy. But the map also paid particular attention to Africa. One legend says that he had access to the ‘charts of Portuguese navigators’ (which could only have defined, at the time when he was working, the African coast as far as the Gulf of Guinea). The shape of Africa was almost total guesswork, with the whole continent being inscribed as Ethiopia, except for some western and central parts. Along the east of Africa is a large island called Diab; although this might be taken for Madagascar, the name is never found anywhere else and is possibly a confusion with Dib, the Arab word for the Maldives.

One region was even given over to the Bnichilebs, the ‘dog-faced people’ of classical mythology. On the Nile were the so-called ‘Gates of Iron’, which the Ethiopians were said to open once a year out of the goodness of their hearts, allowing the waters to flood down to Egypt.

Apart from such confusions and remnants of ancient legends, the map was a great advance in thinking about Africa. Foremost was the faith it showed in the possibility of sailing round the end of the continent into the Indian Ocean. Most significant of all, several towns are marked along the eastern seaboard of Africa, including Kilwa and Sofala; never before had a European map borne these names, and as far as is known no European had ever set eyes on them. Who had been Mauro’s source? Most probably Nicolo de’ Conti once again, for those great Indian ports he had lived in, such as Calicut, faced the coast of East Africa.

The Portuguese had every reason to be pleased with their purchase from the monastery of San Michele di Murano. They struck a medal in honour of ‘Frater Mauro, Cosmographus incomparabilis’.5 In years to come, simplified copies of his map would be handed to the caravel captains, to check against their discoveries.

FIFTEEN

The Lust for Pepper, the Hunt for Prester John

I gave to this subject six or seven years of great anxiety, explaining, to the best of my ability, how great service might be done to our Lord, by this undertaking, in promulgating his sacred name and our holy faith among so many nations … It was also requisite to refer to the temporal prosperity which was foretold in the writings of so many trustworthy and wise historians, who related that great riches were to be found in these parts.

—Christopher Columbus, in a letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain (1499)

AFTES 1481 the pace of Portuguese exploration was transformed, for John II came to the throne in that year. As a sixteen-year-old prince he had exulted in the massacre at Arzila, and ten years later proved implacable in his use of power. At home, John openly challenged the nobles who had bent his weak father to their will. Abroad, he showed himself adroit, especially in improving the old ties with England. Most of all, he ordered that the caravels should once more push boldly into the southern hemisphere. Their captains began charting league upon league of the African coast. Any doubts his courtiers showed were brushed aside.